and Randy Croome. When it was all over, I felt a little sad. The many teams from the Midwest, Canada and the East were packing up for the long trip home. Andy Lee's squad (Nagatuck Swim Club) had the longest journey--all the way back to Connecticut. I watched them go and knew how it would be, for I remembered other trips and one especially--the first one. It was to Ohio, to a meet like this one....and as we drove home on that warm Ohio night, I thought of all the times we'd had and I reckoned they were thinking of them too. The shadows of their forms, stretched in a row across the back of the station wagon, were visible rising in the windows as the headlights of a passing car threw them up, and then my eyes adjusted to the purple glow of night again. I sat half-propped up against the back door on a blanket, my feet snuggled in the other end. The radio rasped through waves of static as stations came and went, and I judged it was as good a map as any, for one could mark the trip according to the town and the tune that drifted over the air waves. I remembered how it had been in the morning, then...misty, a little cold, but we were warm and sleepy at 4AM and the radio pulled in stations from farther and farther away...there were new sounds, sounds that made you realize you were heading to a new place--to race!--and then you woke up a little, already tasting the excitement and the hope. But now the hopes were answered--for better or for worse--and it was a time to rest and think and dream again...dreams that might come true.

Howard Scarborough, coach of Osborn Swim Club, and I recently came upon this document written in the style of PLATO in the form of a dialogue. Its obvious worth to antiquity would seem to indicate that swimming was known to the ancients, and that the values propounded therein are indeed universal....

ON THE RAIL-ROADICUS SUBTERRANEOUS * (* translation: On the Underground Railroad) being a dialogue between Marcus Scarbaurelius and Diogenes Sulla

Diog.: "Hail, friend Marcus!" Marc.: "Greetings, Sulla." Diog.: "How goes it with thee, Marcus?" Marc.: "Not well, Sulla. A matter of unethical dealings at the natatorium. And you?" Diog.: "I too have encountered such problems." Marc.: "It would seem Poseidon and the gods are angry." Diog.: "Hah! not Poseidon, friend Marcus. Nay, closer to Rome than that. Rather Neptune who is behind these unethical practices... Neptune's Navy on the other side of the city."